John of Fiesole (born Guido di Pietro; – 18 February 1455), known posthumously as Fra Angelico ( , ; "Angelic Friar/Brother") or in Italian as Beato Angelico ("Blessed Angelic One"), was an Italian Dominican friar and painter active during the early Florentine Renaissance.
Angelico created a series of frescoes for the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, where he received the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici. His works include the San Marco Altarpiece and the Deposition of Christ, both made for the convent of San Marco. Painting exclusively religious subjects throughout his career, Angelico completed commissions in Rome under the patronage of Popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V. Angelico was a pioneer of the artistic trends that came to distinguish the early Renaissance, namely linear perspective and a greater attention to depth and form than had been practised in the late Medieval period.
Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. In 1984, John Paul declared him the patron of artists, especially painters.
Biography He was known to his contemporaries as ('Friar John of Fiesole'), reflecting the town where he joined the Dominican Order, and ('Angelic Brother John'). In modern Italian, he is referred to as ('Blessed Angelic One') following his beatification by Pope John Paul II.
Early life, 1395–1436 Fra Angelico was born around 1395 in the Tuscan region of Mugello, specifically in the town of Vicchio near Fiesole. He was baptised Guido di Pietro and had a younger brother named Benedetto. The earliest known record of him is dated 17 October 1417, when he attended a religious confraternity or guild at the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel under the name Guido di Pietro. Payments made to Guido di Pietro in January and February 1418 for work at the church of Santo Stefano del Ponte in Florence indicate that he was already working as a painter.Werner Cohn, Il Beato Angelico e Battista di Biagio Sanguigni. Revista d'Arte, V, (1955): 207–221.
By 1423, Angelico had joined the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole. Following the custom of adopting a new name upon entering a religious order, he adopted the name Fra Giovanni (Friar John).Stefano Orlandi, Beato Angelico; Monographia Storica della Vita e delle Opere con Un'Appendice di Nuovi Documenti Inediti. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1964. As a Dominican, he relied on alms and donations for his livelihood. Angelico initially trained as a manuscript illuminator and may have collaborated with his brother Benedetto, who also joined the Dominican Order. Some illuminated manuscripts have been attributed to him or his workshop, though these attributions remain debated.Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists. Penguin Classics, 1965. He may have been influenced by Lorenzo Monaco, though direct training is not documented, and influences from the Sienese school are evident in his work. Angelico trained with Master Varricho in Milan. According to Giorgio Vasari, Angelico's first major work was an altarpiece and a painted screen for the Charterhouse (Carthusian monastery) of Florence, though nothing remains of these today.
From 1408 to 1418, Angelico painted frescoes, many of which have now been lost, at the Dominican friary of Cortona as an assistant to Gherardo Starnina or one of his followers.Getty Education[] By 1418, he had returned to Fiesole, where he painted a number of works for the monastery, including the Fiesole Altarpiece. A predella of the altarpiece depicting Christ in Glory alongside over 250 figures, including beatified Dominicans, is conserved in the National Gallery. Around 1427, Angelico produced an altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin, which remained at San Domenico until 1812 when artist and collector Vivant Denon acquired it for the Louvre. Angelico also produced a Madonna of Humility now kept in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Also completed at this time were an Annunciation and a Madonna of the Pomegranate, both of which are now in the Prado Museum.
San Marco, Florence, 1436–1445
In 1436, Angelico was one of a number of friars from Fiesole who moved to the newly built convent of San Marco in Florence. This move placed him at the heart of the artistic life of the region. During these years in Florence, he was certainly in contact with the three artistic circles in the city in the early 15th century: the school of miniaturists, the workshops of the last Giottesque students (followers of Giotto), and a group of young sculptors and architects destined for great fame: Jacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello.
Angelico soon attracted the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, one of the wealthiest and most powerful members of the city's governing authority, the Signoria, and the founder of the Medici Dynasty that was to dominate Florentine politics for much of the Renaissance. Cosimo had a cell reserved for himself at the convent as a retreat from the world. Vasari reports that Cosimo commissioned Angelico to decorate the convent with frescoes, which were greatly admired at the time. They include the magnificent fresco of the chapter house, the much-reproduced Annunciation at the top of the stairs leading to the cells, the Maestà (or Coronation of the Madonna) with Saints (cell 9), and many other smaller devotional frescoes in the cells depicting stories of the Nativity and Passion of Jesus.
In his early works, Angelico retained a Gothic style. In the small tabernacles of San Marco, however, the simplicity of his compositions and colours shows traces of the mature style that was to characterize his works. In his Deposition of Christ, produced for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Trinita, he reached the full expression of this style. In this painting, the naturalistic spirit of the 15th century is affirmed by the lifelike figures, who possess a variety of expressions and gestures, as well as in the representation of a naturalistic landscape, which replaced the traditional gold ground typical of the Gothic period.
In 1439, Angelico completed one of his most famous and influential works: the San Marco Altarpiece. It created a new religious genre, sacra conversazione (sacred conversation), later used by artists including Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Perugino and Raphael.Frederick Hartt, A History of Italian Renaissance Art, (1970) Thames & Hudson, Although representations of the enthroned Madonna and Child surrounded by saints were common, they were depicted in a heaven-like setting, hovering as spiritual presences rather than with earthly substance. In the San Marco Altarpiece, the saints stand squarely within the space, grouped in a natural way as if conversing about their shared witness of the Virgin Mary.
The Vatican, 1445–1455 In 1445, Pope Eugene IV summoned Angelico to Rome to paint the frescoes of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament at St Peter's, later demolished by Pope Paul III. Vasari suggests that at this time Angelico was offered the Archbishopric of Florence by Pope Nicholas V, which he rejected, recommending another friar in his place. However, the story does not align with the historical facts. In 1445 the Pope was Eugene IV and Nicholas was not to be elected until two years later in March 1447. The archbishop in question during 1446–1459 was the Dominican Antoninus of Florence (Antonio Pierozzi), who was canonized by Pope Adrian VI in 1523.
In 1447, Angelico and his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, travelled to Orvieto to produce works for the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary. Among his other pupils was Zanobi Strozzi.
From 1447 to 1449, Angelico was again at the Vatican, designing the frescoes for the Niccoline Chapel for Nicholas V. The scenes from the lives of the two martyred deacons of the Early Christian Church, St. Stephen and St. Lawrence may have been executed wholly or in part by assistants. The small chapel, with its brightly frescoed walls and gold leaf decorations, gives the impression of a jewel box. From 1449 until 1452, Angelico returned to the convent in Fiesole, where he became Prior.
Death and beatification
Fra Angelico died in 1455 while staying at a Dominican convent in Rome, possibly on an order to work on Pope Nicholas' chapel. He was buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in Rome.The tomb has been given greater visibility since the beatification. Angelico was interred in a niche near the altar in a marble tomb. The tombstone is an effigy carved in relief depicting Angelico in a Dominican habit. Above the tomb are two epitaphs, probably by Lorenzo Valla. The first reads:
Below this is inscribed:
The English writer and critic William Michael Rossetti wrote of the friar:
Pope John Paul II beatified Angelico on 3 October 1982 and in 1984 declared him patron of Catholic artists. John Paul II noted that:
He is commemorated by the current Roman Martyrology on 18 February,Martyrologium Romanum, ex decreto sacrosancti oecumenici Concilii Vaticani II instauratum auctoritate Ioannis Pauli Pp. II promulgatum, editio [typica] altera, Typis Vaticanis, A.D. MMIV (2004), p. 155 the date of his death in 1455. There the Latin text reads Beatus Ioannes Faesulanus, cognomento Angelicus ("Blessed John of Fiesole, known as the Angelic").
Evaluation
Background Angelico worked during a period of significant change in European artistic style, marked by the transition from the Medieval tradition to the Early Renaissance. This shift began in the fourteenth century with artists such as Giotto and Giusto de' Menabuoi. Both Angelico and de' Menabuoi produced major works in Padua, while Giotto had earlier trained in Florence under the Gothic painter Cimabue.
Giotto's fresco cycle depicting the life of Saint Francis at the Basilica of Santa Croce represented a departure from earlier conventions through its emphasis on naturalism, spatial coherence, and emotional expression. His approach influenced a number of later painters who adopted and expanded upon his techniques, such as the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and their developments towards narrative clarity and realism.
Altarpieces The works of Angelico combine elements of the late Gothic tradition with emerging Renaissance principles. In his Coronation of the Virgin, an altarpiece painted for the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, Angelico employed features typical of prestigious fourteenth-century altarpieces, including a finely worked gold ground and extensive use of azurite and vermilion pigments. The gilded haloes and gold-edged garments reflect the refined decorative conventions of Gothic painting.
The work also demonstrates characteristics associated with the Renaissance. In contrast to earlier Gothic examples, such as altarpieces by Gentile da Fabriano, Angelico's figures are rendered with greater solidity, three-dimensional form, and naturalism. The drapery of the garments follows the structure of the bodies beneath, and the figures convey a sense of physical weight, despite being depicted standing on clouds rather than on solid ground.
Frescoes
Angelico produced a series of frescoes for the cells of San Marco that built upon Masaccio's work. The dormitory of San Marco consists of three corridors with thirty-eight internal cells, each decorated by Angelico with frescoes depicting scenes from the life of Jesus in a loose narrative sequence.
The fresoes are the same shape as the arched window and vaulted ceiling of each cell. The decoration and style reflects the Dominican Rule's focus on charity, and the cells contain no other decorations to distract from the fresco scenes. Vasari explains that Angelico was inspired to create a large crucifixion scene with many saints for the chapter house after Cosimo de' Medici saw the frescoes. As with the other frescoes, de' Medici's patronage did not influence Angelico's artistic expression with displays of wealth.